There is this saying, maybe some of you know it. Goes something like this: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Give a man a fishing rod, and he will trade it for a fish! This is because man is lazy and will always have his hand out as long as there are hand-outs.
It wont solve the worlds problems, but it will at make Bitcoin mainstream.
Who runs the fund? To who can we trust to distribute these hardship donations? I'm thinking along the lines of, no-one! Maybe these need to be super-localised, someone needs to step up in every locality that covers x thousand people. Kind of removes the temptation toward sticky fingered types.
The fund could be managed just by code. Or maybe the Bitcoin foundation could be custodian. Then you can make this hardware fingerprint-scanner that only works with live fingers, scan and get access to your wallet. The cost of the scanner would be higher than the value of the satoshis but one scanner can be used by many people. So one guy with a computer and a fingerprint scanner could make a business out of scanning peoples fingerprints and giving them access to their wallets for a fee. I think the market will solve the problem.